AMD's newest roadmap reveals a major shift in early 2010: the company will once again overhaul its socket architecture to make way for DDR3 support.

The new socket, dubbed G34, will also ship with two new second-generation 45nm processors. The first of these processors, 8-core Sao Paolo, is described as a "twin native-quadcore Shanghai processor" by one AMD engineer. Shanghai, expected to ship late this year, is AMD's first 45nm shrink of the ill-fated Barcelona processor.

Both of these new processors will feature four HyperTransport 3 interconnects, 12MB of L3 cache and 512KB L2 cache per core.

Intel's next-generation Nehalem chip, scheduled for launch late this year but already well leaked, is the first to feature tri-channel DDR3 memory support. AMD will up the ante in 2010, with registered and unregistered quad-channel DDR3 support. Current roadmaps claim standard support will include speeds from 800 to 1600 MHz.

AMD insiders would reveal very little about the G34 socket, other than its a derivative of the highly secretive G3 socket that was to replace Socket F (1207). As far as company documentation goes, G3 ceased to exist in March 2008, and has been replaced with the G34 program instead. The first of these sockets will be available for developers in early 2009.

We counted 1974 pin connects on the leaked G34 diagram -- 767 more pins than AMD's current LGA1207 socket. Given the additional interconnect pathways for DDR3 and the HyperTransport buses, a significant increase in the number of pins was to be expected.

The addition of a fourth HyperTransport link may prove to be one of the most interesting features of the Sao Paulo and Magny-Cours processors. In a full four-socket configuration, each physical processor will dedicate a HyperTransport link to each of the other sockets. This leaves one additional HyperTransport lane per processor, which AMD documentation claims will finally be used for its long-discussed Torrenza program.

The hype behind Torrenza largely disappeared after AMD's Barcelona launch sour, though the company has hinted before that Torrenza will make a perfect interconnect to GPUs or IBM Cell processors. This is exactly the type of setup roadmapped for the fastest public supercomputer in the world, IBM's Roadrunner.

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Nehalem processors are a bit rectangular too. I really hope these AMD processors are on par with Intel's current offerings at that time, so more new innovations get pushed regardless of who does them for less money. Yay for the consumer!

One of the keys to if/when AMD will catch up comes from the overall system architecture and any limitations in that overall architecture from both AMD and Intel.

Intel may have a great processor at the moment, but the people at Intel are focused on making each component in a system better, not looking for ways to improve performance by improving the overall system. This is why AMD was able to easily hold the lead back in the days of the Athlon 64 vs. Pentium 4. Not only did AMD have a processor that was roughly as fast as a Pentium 4, but AMD had a better system architecture(integrated memory controller), which is why AMD held the lead. Intel made a huge jump in CPU performance/design, so they have taken the lead, but if/when AMD catches up in CPU design, that may give them the lead again.

AMD is working on these issues, but the question is when AMD will come up with a new overall design that will really give them a huge jump in performance. Even with the design improvements of K10, it still shared quite a bit of design similarities with K8, and an all new design is probably required at this point to let AMD regain the performance lead.

Likely won't happen like that again. With Nehalem, Intel has leveled off the playing field. QuickPath is similar to Hypertransport (although QuickPath is faster than HT3.0). Intel has also added the IMC just as AMD has. This should nix any real advantages AMD might gain by changing architecture around since all things are relatively equal in terms of architecture now.

Which information did get it from that Quickpath is faster than HT3.0? Because AMD HT3.0 haven't work on any Barcelona CPU yet.Current Barcelona current CPU only use HT1.0 and HT2.0. But AMD working on to succeed the HT3.0 in Shanghai processor.As the current processor only the Phenom CPU have HT3.0. Shanghai 45nm not only the cache is improving, it also improve it single thread is improving 15 percent faster than current processor clock for clock.